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NEWYOR.KER.5TOR.E.COM 877.408.4269 82 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2009 through a variety of effects pedals, and you've got a pretty big palette. More like conductors than like typical players, these guitarists managed to turn their instruments into a kind of choir. T he band's latest release, "The Eter- nal," is its sixteenth full-length effort, and my favorite Sonic Youth album in a long time, though I've liked plenty of them. The members of Sonic Youth are in their forties and fifties now, and their recording technique has changed very little since their first ses- sions. "We're still playing old analog boxes and electric guitars with guitar amps, recording on tape, mixing on tape," Ranaldo says. 'We haven't gotten any more professional, thank God." Songs are communally written, and developed over long periods of improvising. Mark Ibold (who was once the bassist for Pave- ment) recorded and wrote with the band this time around, making it a five-piece again. (Steve Shelley, the drummer, has been with Sonic Youth since 1985. The multi-instrumentalist Jim O'Rourke joined the band in the late nineties but left in 2005.) On this record, they've focussed on crafting songs rather than open-ended compositions. Moore told me recently, "I remember being on tour in the nine- ties, when we started releasing more kind of lengthy, experimental stuff on our own label, and Malkmus"-the Pavement songwriter Stephen Malk- mus-"was driving us somewhere. We were playing it in his rental car, and he said, 'I hope you guys don't leave the power of the song behind.' He liked Sonic Youth as a songwriting band-he had a sort of charming concern about it." One of "The Eternal" , s dreamiest tracks, "Antenna," begins with a simple guitar figure plucked over a brief wash of white noise and thumping tomtoms. Moore sings, in a gentle, conversational way, "My darling cruises the streets for pleasure, skyscrapers in the dead love dawn." The lyric might be a rueful nod to the chorus of "The Wonder," from the 1988 release "Daydream Nation": "I'm just walking around, your city is a d " won er town. Much of the pleasure here is in the sound. The producer and engineer John Agnello has captured all sides of the band's multipurpose guitars. I worried that the album didn't have one of those lengthy, broken-open garbage bags of noise, a song like "Expressway to Yr. Skull," from 1986, in which all the dragons and feath- ers and firecrackers and water pistols get to run free. But "Calming the Snake," though it's only three and a half minutes long, comes amazingly close. It com- presses the push-me-pull-you rhythm of soft lulls and big buildups into pop-song length without sacrificing any heat or un- MY noise, and it features Gordon on vo- cals, doing the kind of punk yowling that the band hasn't tried in a while. "Come on down, down to the river, come on down, I want to feel you shiver," she hisses. Gordon does the screaming on "The Eternal" while the boys do the nice sing- ing. Several songs feature one or more of them singing in unison, an arrangement trick that Sonic Youth has so far largely avoided. Moore told me that the band was purposefiùly exploring more conven- tional vocal techniques, such as "getting Lee to harmonize with my non-singing." Nonetheless, as has always been the group's way, the vocals come only after the music for each piece is recorded. At that point, Moore, Gordon, and Ranaldo divvy up the songs, and each tries singing on a different one, sometimes trading after a week or so if someone is stuck, sometimes adding a track on top of someone else's. The fact that the music is finished first is a point of pride, and is perhaps the best testament to the band's career-long loyalty to the possibilities of sound. "For us, songs get born out of a guitar's tonality as much as they get born out of chords and structures," Ranaldo says. 'We're creating pieces of music as pieces of music. That's all we're thinking about. 'Does this piece of music sound d ;>'" goo . By the early nineties, dozens of bands had picked up the Sonic Youth habit, de- veloping their own proprietary tunings and making waves of noise. This year, F enderwill issue the Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo signature Jazzmasters, each kitted out according to the players' prefer- ences for things like finish, pickup, head- stock, and width of frets. The band that once specialized in manhandling pawn- shop guitars has become an institution. . NEWYORKER.COM Sasha Frere-Janes's pop-music blog.